Conductor Timothy Redmond began with some words of explanation. All three compositions on Saturday evening’s programme held in common their being premièred by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. And having himself worked closely with Thomas Adès, the composer of the first of the three items to be performed, he expressed his admiration for Adès phenomenal orchestration.

America: A Prophecy had initially been commissioned in 1998, along with five other composers’ pieces, by the Director of the New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur, as part of a collective celebration of hope for the world in the forthcoming millennium. Adès’ vision, however, had turned out to be anything but hopeful.

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The work in two movements, a piece of ‘musical theatre,’ as Tim Redmond described it, had acclaimed Mezzo-soprano, Bianca Andrew, as the plaintive Mayan prophetess who foresees the destruction of the nation by forces ‘from the East,’ the implication within this work being also that the Spanish Conquistadors would themselves eventually suffer the same fate as their victims.

Bianca Andrews’ purity of tone and plangent delivery was perfectly adapted to the bleak topic of the piece which represents a nation under attack.

Adès’ historical retrospective contributes to a theme associated with ruins and the fall of empires which essentially emerged in the C18th.

Rome

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire obliged the British, increasingly coming to think of themselves in terms of their imperial destiny, to understand that empires don’t just rise, they also fall.

Sham ruins in country estates and parks (Sanderson Miller’s ‘folly’ at Wimpole, for example) reminded landowners that a constant moral vigilance was necessary if they weren’t to suffer the same fate as their predecessors.

A much read book of the period was the Frenchman, Volney’s ‘Ruins’, avidly read by Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s novel, which teaches him that the Roman empire fell through the degeneration of the ‘wonderful virtue’ of the early Romans.

‘The people move as if in dreams / They are weak from f**k and drink’ (Bianca sang it beautifully)!

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William Blake’s America: A Prophesy (1793) is a poetic paraphrase of the claims of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness set out in the Declaration of Independence. For Blake, paradise was not lost but rather had been regained in America.

The Twin Towers, September 11 2001

But in Thomas Adès’ work of the same title, the ruins of empire would become symbolically realised with tragic irony a few years later in the destruction of the World Trade Centre and mass murder of 2,996 people.

Thomas Ades

John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls (2002) is a tremendously moving composition which attempts to give artistic and musical expression to the crime by, in addition to orchestra and chorus, making use of pre-recordings representing the typical sounds of a city, with the input of voices which intone the direct vernacular of phrases and utterances used by people at the time.

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As they had been in the previous work, Cambridge Philharmonic and Chorus were a powerful combined force, here delivering the range of emotions involved, employing various musical and technical means to communicate shock, grief, disorientation, confusion, anger and helplessness. Especially affecting was the sound of children – the contribution of St Catherine’s Girls’ Choir and The Perse Concert Voices reminding us that not only adults were victims on that day.

Charles Ives

After the interval and these two unsettling works, Tim Redmond introduced Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2 with some very helpful remarks on what to look out for in the piece, especially useful being a ‘list’ of the allusions this ‘ultimate magpie’ of a composer deployed throughout the symphony.

By getting the orchestra to demonstrate representative snatches, Tim Redmond then got it to display how Ives stacks all the themes, one on top of another, to produce a fantastically joyous and ebullient sound.

How different was this American ‘vision’ from what we had heard in the first half of the concert. Ives’ 2nd Symphony was written at the turn of the last century, yet not premièred until 1951. It is redolent of life and promise, sharing that identical sense of C20th America on a roll [Ives himself was a self-made millionaire] which we find in Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics for the title song in the near contemporary film of Oklahoma (1955).

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This programme, both demanding and rewarding in equal measure, was effectively performed in chronologically reverse order. But if the message in the music we heard had ultimately tragic implications for America and the world, Cambridge Philharmonic’s performances of it were certainly outstanding throughout.